Friday Fiction Feature

Welcome back to the Fiction Reboot and the Friday Fiction Feature! Compiled by the irreplaceable research assistant, this week it’s a mash-up theme:

Tabatha here–welcome! What was going to be random suggestions has turned into a cross between typos and another installment of “titles that make me laugh.” While searching for books off my suggestions list a typo gave me some very odd results. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did. ____________________________________________________________ ;

First up is a non-fiction work that I have been assured could save lives, The Man’s No Nonsense Guide to Women: How to Succeed in Romance on Planet Earth by Marc H. Rudov. Is Life With Her an Endless Game of Chess?Ever look skyward, after yet another frustrating encounter with her, yelling aloud: Why is she so impossible? Why can’t I figure her out? You’ve heard that men and women are from different planets, and that, somehow, we must patiently accept, celebrate, understand, and navigate these differences. Right? Marc Rudov says, “BALONEY.”

; Next is a book that I just couldn’t pass up. I don’t know if it was the talking nipples, or the fact that they have a diabolical plan (I wonder how nipples could go about carrying out any kind of a plan…guess I’ll have to read it to find out), but either way, once I found it, I just had to share Fruit: A Novel About a Boy and His Nipples by Brian Francis. Thirteen-year-old Peter Paddington is overweight, the subject of his classmates’ ridicule, and the victim of too many bad movie-of-the-week storylines. When his nipples begin speaking to him one day and inform him of their diabolical plan to expose his secret desires, Peter finds himself cornered in a world that seems to have no tolerance for difference. Peter’s only solace is “The Bedtime Movies” – perfect-world fantasies that lull him to sleep every night. But when the lines between Peter’s fantasies and his reality begin to blur, his hilarious adventures in overeating, family dysfunction, and the terrifying world of sexual awakening really begin. We’ll take a turn for the absurd with Nonsense Novels by Stephen Leacock and Daniel Handler. A gift? Yes-a gift for you. You’re welcome.—from the introduction by Daniel HandlerNonsense Novels sends up the silliest conventions of the ghost story, the detective story, the rags-to-riches story, the adventure story, the shipwreck story, and, of course, the story itself. Among other things. Here the close cultivation of cliché yields a bumper crop of absurdity and the utterly ludicrous turns up at every new twist of the tale. ;

The Declaration (The Declaration #1) by Gemma Malley takes us into (one of) my favorite genres: the dystopia. It’s the year 2140 and Longevity drugs have all but eradicated old age. A never-aging society can’t sustain population growth… which means Anna should never have been born. Nor should any of the children she lives with at Grange Hall. The facility is full of boys and girls whose parents chose to have kids–called surpluses–despite a law forbidding them from doing so. These children are raised as servants, and brought up to believe they must atone for their very existence. Then one day a boy named Peter appears at the Hall, bringing with him news of the world outside, a place where people are starting to say that Longevity is bad, and that maybe people shouldn’t live forever. Peter begs Anna to escape with him, but Anna’s not sure who to trust: the strange new boy whose version of life sounds like a dangerous fairy tale, or the familiar walls of Grange Hall and the head mistress who has controlled her every waking thought? Chilling, poignant, and endlessly though-provoking, The Declaration is a powerful debut that will have readers agonizing over Anna’s fate until the very last page.

And last but not least, comes James Bond: Choice of Weapons: Three 007 Novels: The Facts of Death; Zero Minus Ten; The Man with the Red Tattoo (James Bond (Extended Series)) a new author’s extension of the original books, in which he imitates the first author, whose works inspired the movies which made Bond famous…because who needs simplicity. In this new collection of James Bond novels, published in trade paperback for the first time, we are once again treated to the thrilling adventures of Fleming’s classic hero, first in The Facts of Death, which pits Britain’s famed secret agent against a fanatic cult who has murdered M’s lover; then in Zero Minus Ten, where Bond finds himself in Hong Kong to investigate a series of deadly shipping explosions; and finally in The Man with the Red Tattoo, where Bond must stop a Japanese crime ring from attempting a mass assassination with a deadly strain of the West Nile virus. As an added bonus for the fanatical Bond fan base, the collection includes two short stories never before published in book form, “Live at Five” and “Midsummer Night’s Doom.” Through it all, Raymond Benson masterfully evokes the classic Bond flair, romance, and elan that made Ian Fleming’s novels worldwide bestsellers.